Tom Wainwright
speaker
83 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 4d ago
Tom Wainwright’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 1.
Appearances
The panic is summed up in The New Dark Ages, a just-published polemic by James Marriott.
He rounds up the evidence that reading is in decline, placing most of the blame on smartphones, which he calls predators of our attention.
Drawing on Walter Ong, a cultural historian, Mr Marriott explains how oral delivery often employs a back-looping structure, where the speaker rambles and repeats as they hone their argument on the go.
Writing, on the other hand, allows for logically structured reasoning.
As audiences slip back to oral media, some of those pre-literate traits are back in fashion.
The back-looping style, which is a bit tedious on the page but helps spoken ideas to stick, has returned thanks to the podcast.
Joe Rogan, the world's top podcaster, often natters away with his guests for three hours.
And Charlie Kirk was a master of the lightning rejoinder that on paper would be unpersuasive, but when delivered before a hyped-up crowd was an oratorical knockout punch.
The oral turn also helps to explain the success of politicians like Donald Trump, who by conventional standards might seem to be a dreadful communicator.
Rather than construct arguments, Mr. Trump has a tendency to pile up assertions.
Such words defy belief when transcribed, yet Mr. Trump has proved to be one of the great communicators of his time.
Some have even compared his tagging of enemies like Crooked Hillary and Sleepy Joe to Homer, who used epithets like Ox-Eyed Hero and Crooked-Counseled Kronos to lodge characters in audiences' minds.
All this is interesting for linguists, but it may have policy implications too.
Whereas written argument copes well with abstract ideas, oral delivery relies more on the concrete and the vivid.
Sometimes this translates to actual policies.
In his desire to project toughness on immigration, Mr. Trump conjured up the idea of an actual wall, and so one was partly built.
From Nayab Bukele's mega-prison in El Salvador to Narendra Modi's Ram Mandir in India, politicians who deal in concrete symbols as answers to abstract problems sometimes have to build them.
Some of the worry about the decline of reading is overdone.
Anyone pining for the good old days of newspapers should read some from the 19th century, before advertisers and the need to appeal to a mass readership forced journalists and editors to make fewer things up.
Angry videos on social media today can lead to online witch hunts, but from the 15th century onwards, angry screeds published on the new presses fermented some actual witch hunts.
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